Roald Dahl, the British author of children’s books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the “writing hut,” and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf’s house. Dahl died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, but one day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and local families swarm in like guests at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. There are games—Splat the Rat and Guess the Number of Sweeties in the Jar—and tea, cakes, and orange squash for sale. An R.A.F. band plays in the shade of the house. This year, I attended myself. The appointed day was hot and bright, with a clear sky that Dahl would have described as “milky blue.” The girls wore sherbet-colored canvas hats; the boys, their pale legs poking out of shorts, looked destined for sunburns. Many of the kids peered inside the writing hut—they weren’t allowed in—and seemed to discover there further evidence that Dahl was a strangely sympathetic adult who shared a preoccupation with candy, a clinical fascination with the body, and a love of ingenious, self-devised schemes.
The adults who looked into the hut were less impressed. The walls, lined with Styrofoam, were stained sepia from all the cigarettes Dahl smoked; there was a grotty wing chair; and wires for a jury-rigged heating system dangled from the ceiling. “You’d expect it to be grander,” one woman said. But the kids saw more possibilities in a musty old hut of one’s own. They liked the fact that Dahl, unsatisfied with desks, had designed a baize-covered writing board, to balance on his lap just so. And they loved that he kept, on a side table, a jar containing gristly bits of his own spine, which had been removed during an operation on his lower back. Next to the jar was a waxy-looking knob that turned out to be Dahl’s hip bone, along with a titanium replacement.
“It makes a good letter opener,” one little boy said of the prosthetic hip.
“Has it got blood on it?” another asked hopefully.
Several young visitors asked for permission to hold the ball of chocolate-bar wrappers that Dahl had made as a young man; he scrunched a new one into the ball each day, after eating his habitual lunchtime treat. (Now hard and surprisingly heavy, the wad resembles a small cannonball.) Still, what seemed to excite the children the most was the paperback collection of Dahl’s own work. “Look!” several of them cried. “There are the books!”
Dahl, whose first book for children, “The Gremlins,” was published in 1943, and whose last, “The Minpins,” was published posthumously, in 1991, has been astonishingly popular for nearly half a century. In a 2000 survey, British readers named him their favorite author. Around the world, more than ten million copies of his books sold last year. This number is all the more striking because Dahl did not write an extended series, which is often the key to mega-success as a children’s writer. Nor, in an era when many children’s books are specifically marketed to either boys or girls, does his work appeal primarily to one gender. Six of his books have been made into movies, and a monster-budget version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as the daft, dangerous, and endlessly inventive confectioner, Willy Wonka, opens in July.
Dahl is also, however, a children’s writer whom many adults over the years have disliked or distrusted, though they have not always found it easy to say why. It’s not because his work is sexually explicit (a common complaint about, say, Judy Blume’s). There is no hint of sex, or even romance, in Dahl’s children’s books, most of which are intended for preadolescent children. Nor are they disappointing as pieces of writing—quite the opposite. Dahl’s books, which move along at a seductively brisk pace, are propelled by crisp verbs (“clambered,”“chirruped,”“rasped”) and delightful made-up words (“swishfiggler,”“snozzcumber,”“Vermicious Knids”). He plays exuberantly with synonyms (“He’s dotty!” they cried. “He’s barmy!”“He’s batty!”“He’s nutty!”“He’s screwy!”“He’s wacky!”). The tone is conversational, confiding, and funny, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation points and phrases written entirely in capital letters. It’s as if the sentences came embedded with their own stage directions. (Like “Winnie the Pooh” and “Alice in Wonderland,” Dahl’s books originated as stories told aloud to children; he had five of his own.) In a Dahl book, you are never out of earshot of a sly authorial voice that is sharing a secret joke about a character—or is announcing that it’s about to yank you out of a scene that’s becoming a bit too gross or distressing.
Adults’ objections to Dahl have more to do with his sensibility. There is bathroom humor: the protagonist of “The B.F.G.” (1982), the Big Friendly Giant, insists on “whizpopping,” his word for farting, in front of the Queen. And Dahl has a waspish tone—unsentimental, ever so slightly sadistic, and archly amusing—that’s closer to Evelyn Waugh’s than to Beverly Cleary’s. (Lemony Snicket, the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” owes a significant debt to Dahl.)
“Matilda” (1988) is the story of a prodigiously bright little girl who suffers at the hands of her boorish mother and father. The book offers a bracingly disdainful commentary on neglectful, selfish parents. But, first, Dahl has a little fun at the expense of the doting ones:
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there’s nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the world. It’s only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, “Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!”
School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write their end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher, I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. “Your son Maximilian,” I would write, “is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else.” Or, if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, “It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing organs in the sides of their abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing organs at all.”
Routinely in Dahl’s books, adults who mistreat children or animals get grotesque comeuppances, and these are often engineered by the victims, through their own cunning and courage. In “The Twits” (1980), the repellent Mr. and Mrs. Twit are glued upside down to the floor by the enterprising monkeys and birds they’ve been tormenting. In “James and the Giant Peach” (1961), the evil Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge are crushed to death when James and the eponymous peach roll down a hill. And it’s not just bad parents who get their comeuppance. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Dahl metes out nasty punishments to unpleasant children. The greedy Augustus Gloop is squeezed into the chocolate works; the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde blows up into a giant blueberry; the television addict Mike Teavee is miniaturized; the spoiled Veruca Salt is dropped down a garbage chute. That the kids all make it out of the factory in the end doesn’t much soften the fact that Wonka saw them go with no regret—indeed, with considerable glee.
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In many children’s books—contrary to what parents tell their children about the meaning of appearances—physical ugliness signifies its moral equivalent. Dahl takes this to an extreme, describing his villains’ repulsive attributes with brio: Mr. Hazell’s “great, glistening, beery face . . . as pink as a ham,” in “Danny, the Champion of the World” (1975); Aunt Sponge’s resemblance to “a great white soggy overboiled cabbage”; the “grizzly old grunion of a grandma” in “George’s Marvelous Medicine” (1981)—the one Dahl book I find irredeemably sour—who has “a small puckered-up mouth, like a dog’s bottom.” Dahl shared with George Orwell an acute sense of why small children often see adults as unsightly or intimidating. “Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below,” Orwell wrote. Dahl once said that adults should get down on their knees for a week, in order to remember what it’s like to live in a world in which the people with all the power literally loom over you.
In Dahl’s fiction, the bad characters aren’t just bad; they’re swing-kids-around-by-their-braids awful—a quality that some adult readers find unsubtle but many children find hilarious and satisfying. Even the good adult characters are often rash or easily cowed, whereas the kids in Dahl’s books are usually sensible, mature, and unflappable. (The kids make all the “good decisions,” as my nine-year-old son puts it.) And in Dahl’s stories the kinds of elaborate schemes that children are forever concocting—and that sensible adults are forever rejecting as impractical or dangerous—yield triumphant results. When the Giant Peach is attacked by sharks while floating across the ocean, James comes up with the idea of attaching loops of string to a flock of seagulls, in order to lift the peach into the air—and, voilà, that’s precisely what happens!
Dahl’s books regularly show up on the American Library Association’s list of titles that patrons ask to be restricted from young children or removed from the shelves. In 1995, a mother attempting to expunge Dahl from elementary-school libraries in Virginia told the Washington Post that in his books “children misbehave and take retribution on adults, and there’s never, ever a consequence for their actions.” According to this surprisingly common critique of Dahl, to defy one adult—no matter how bad a person—is to defy us all.
In 1972, the Horn Book, a journal of children’s literature, published a screed against Dahl by Eleanor Cameron, a children’s-book author. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” she charged, was “one of the most tasteless books ever written for children.” The book was not just about candy; it was candy, “in that it is delectable and soothing while we are undergoing the brief sensory pleasure it affords but leaves us poorly nourished with our taste dulled for better fare.” Dahl reviled television, but his book provided the same easy satisfactions: it was a fast-paced, plot-driven celebration of empty calories. The science-fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in to second Cameron’s criticism, though she had to admit that “children between eight and eleven seem to be truly fascinated” by Dahl’s books. Indeed, one of her own children, she regretted to say, “used to finish ‘Charlie’ and then start right over from the beginning (she was subject to these fits for about two months at age eleven). She was like one possessed while reading it, and for a while after reading she was, for a usually amiable child, quite nasty.” The books, LeGuin concluded, “provide a genuine escape experience, a tiny psychological fugue, very like that provided by comic books.”
